Disclaimer: With this article I don’t want to humiliate or elevate any of the users, developers, web portals, services and others. The above screenshots in the article, as well as comments to them are the subjective opinion of the author and do not call anyone to reckon with him.Now to the point. The idea of writing this article came to me extremely long ago. From the very moment I collected theses, examples and thoughts in a pile, and now I will try to portray them here so that you can develop this idea as I developed it in my head. I hope we succeed. I apologize in advance for the emotional narrative.
To start the observation. The Internet is growing rapidly. No, let's get to the point. On the Internet a huge amount of information. No, let's get closer.
An impressive amount of materials on the Internet is presented in a terrible way. Yes, now it looks like a thesis.
By horrible appearance, I mean the presentation with which the material is served. Take, for example, the “exciting news”, open it on the phone and try to read it.
If you smiled, that's good. But in fact, there is little good. We went to read about ... Wait, but what do we want to read about, where is the title? Ok, let's open the exciting news on the desktop.
Oh yeah, Telegram blocking in Russia ... What a pity, we thought a few months ago. And really, a great pity that we can’t normally read such exciting news.
I'm sure you caught what I'm getting at. Of course, Telegram blocking is really bad. But what's really bad is the plague of pop-up / redundant / secondary content.
Someone Bas Holtrop somehow published a very interesting tweet at his home, which can be described with one simple word “zhiza”.
And so the mobile Internet looked not only in 2017, it looked like this even a little earlier, and now it has only become worse. By the way, in the same thread you can find a huge number of examples of such a scheme. This shows the relevance, scale and seriousness of this problem. And as confirmation of the next post with grumpy.website:
→
Link
It is not only the mobile Internet that suffers, but take for example the well-known large sites.
From the content on the first screen, only the title, and thanks for that.
Hooray, here besides the title, we were able to see another piece of the text, the author, and even the publication date, phenomenally!
Only the third part of the page is available for reading, not more.
Read the title of the article. It would be funny if it were not so sad.
What is going on here?
I could give you a lot of examples, but I already ate enough traffic when loading images on this page. The problem is that we seem to have forgotten how to serve the content, we have forgotten how to make a decent user-friendly design, we have forgotten how to type. What we give to the user is like spitting in the face. At the head, we began to put not content at all, it depreciated. It is more important for us to show the most relevant and attractive advertising as possible, just to get this pitiful click. We want to get rid of litigation for the lack of a banner on the storage of personal data or a tick, but we have completely ceased to care how it will be done. This is very sad and inhuman, comrades.
But little to pay attention to the problem. Someone will probably say: “Well, what do you suggest we do, nerd ?! We already have a lot of work / a cut budget / are too busy / insert your own version ”. And I will answer. We are smart and competent specialists, why not show a drop of enthusiasm, spend 15 minutes more and make it cool and functional. For example:
The guys are doing a good thing, and the truth, why not share one pound with them? Yes, half the content is blocked, but how it is done! Elegant, informative and to the point.
Speaking of elegant examples - not so long ago Vitaly Friedman came to our office. He talked about many things, including humanity, about design systems and gave a large number of unusual examples. Here is a link to the recording of the meeting, for inspiration:
Examples, in addition to those that lead Vitaly, fortunately, there is still a huge set, and the web is not as hopeless as it might seem. But the problem of the complexity of the web is not new. For example, Frank Himero (designer, illustrator, author of the book Shape of design) in one of his speeches spoke about the problem itself, and how you can simply submit an idea, giving a clear list of technical requirements. On Habré there is a worthy
translation , as well as a link to the original, I highly recommend reading.
The complexity of the web in this context touches all directions: analytics, design and, of course, development. But I would not like to go into details, because this is a topic for a separate discussion.
Readers
Readers come to the rescue. These are systems that allow content to be presented in a convenient book format. They are corrected for negligent webmasters (here I mean participants in all website development cycles), throwing a lifeline to the user.
For example, Safari already offers the user to switch to
Reader view and read an interesting article in a neat layout, without unnecessary garbage.
Telegram with its amazing
Instant View (IV) for 2274 resources (and maybe even more). I consider this idea to be one of the best and breakthrough in instant messengers over the past few years, and I take off my hat for implementation. Read more about the technology and how it was embodied, you can read
here . If you read too lazy, I will briefly explain: by sending a link to a supported IV website, Telegram offers to open it directly in the application, and it does this in a couple of milliseconds.
It is not necessary to explain that in both cases the owner of the resource remains in loss, since apart from the main text of the page, nothing more can be transferred or received from the user. As a result, this creates certain difficulties in statistics, in the submission of relevant content and other marketing techniques.
What to do?
The main thing is to be human.In fact, there are not so many solutions. To begin with, it is worthwhile to realize that if a resource is created in order to provide users with certain information, this goal must be fulfilled first of all. After the user has received the information, you can offer him, for example, to try your product, follow additional links or show him an advertisement so as not to be left without a penny. But once again I repeat, look for non-trivial ways for this and remain human with respect to your user. After all, this is how you can be on the same wavelength with him, and if you try, you may even win his trust.
Another case, if your goal is to sell, at any price to cash in with advertising, or to lead the user to another page / resource. Then you, of course, can not focus on the text, just put Lorem ipsum or some cliche, so that the keywords are more. However, the text itself is not so important, you can, for example, mix both of the above options in order to increase the coefficient of uniqueness. Then add a couple of banners to the page, several pop-up windows, and you need to weigh it all with analytics in order to understand which banner is more effective: the top one, the one under it, or the one to the right of the previous two. But after all this, do not forget to ask yourself the question: do you need a text in this case? As soon as you cope with the first question, try to answer the second. Have you created this webpage for people?
Action items
If you allow me, I have accumulated a few tips that can help improve the situation if you fall into it.
First, you need to understand whether your product / website / application / insert your version of the signs that we talked about above. If so, then you have to find out who is responsible for each element of this design. I am ready to argue that most of the questions will appear exactly to the marketing side of your product. If this is not the case, do not worry, we will discuss with you how to proceed.
Marketing
Usually, marketing does not think about how neat the site will look to the end user. This is understandable, they should not think about it. Marketers just do their job and, sorry for the rude generalization, they only think in what way it would be better to fill in the product. To solve this problem, they use third-party tools, invent ingenious campaigns, etc. It is important to understand that
they solve the problem of product development and distribution .
UX (Web Design)
UX-guys, as opposed to marketing, usually think about what the end-user product will look like. But design integration is again
in the hands of the developers , as is the case with marketing. It's very cool when the UX can assemble the interface on its own, using some components, or simply build up a prototype, but this happens far less often than we think.
You probably thought that I want to blame the developers on everything? Well, I do not. If the team can not release a cool, clean, usable product, you should not blame everything on development. Of course, based on what was written above, we can conclude that all the ends converge precisely in the developer code. So it is, the final result appears
when writing the code , but the developer cannot take and not add all the brilliant ideas invented above (above).
And how then, “what are you confusing us, in general it is not clear who is to blame and who should fix all this”?
The team , namely the team, is the initial and final link throughout the development stage. The entire task cycle should be solved jointly. For example, at the stage of the emergence of a “brilliant” idea about a half-page banner, the UX and the developer will spin at the temple and will not allow even thoughts about such an option. When you add a fifth pop-up window to the page, the same thing happens, and the idea will be strangled in the bud. Work in a team, at all stages of project development, because the
final product is the result of collaboration . Here you have the first Action Item.
In a situation where you already have used such “ingenious solutions” in production, I suggest contacting the decision maker and discussing its purpose and appearance. I am sure that this same problem can be solved in a more harmless way.
On the technical side, there are many solutions to improve the User Experience, but I’ll only give some of the most interesting ones, in my opinion.
Google AMP:Instant View from Telegram (if a blog, or a news portal is required)
That's all for today. Thanks for attention. If my reasoning found a response in your soul, let me know, maybe next time I will tell you more about the technical component of this problem.